A major force in Hungarian sculpture, Janos Megyik (b. 1938) is best known for his experiments in three-dimensional geometry. The Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition focuses on the artist’s photograms – pieces he created by placing objects on photographic paper and shining a light on them to darken the unobscured areas and create a kind of shadow work. The 12 photograms and the wall construction on display date from the 1980s, a time when Megyik was moving on from the larch-wood sculptures he had spent the last decade making. Although Megyik was not working with the example of the Bauhaus artists in mind, these large-scale works zigzagging with complexity inevitably invite comparisons with other notable Hungarian contributions to modern art and design. However, they are also the creations of an artist who is not easily pigeonholed. Find out more from the Art Institute of Chicago’s website.
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Corpus (1988), Janos Megyik. Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Roswitha and Konstantin Kleffel. Courtesy the artist
Santa Maria Novella (1981–82) (1982), Janos Megyik. Art Institute of Chicago, Mary and Leigh Block Endowment Fund